Menahem Golan Movies

This action drama is set in an affluent, conservative neighborhood seeking protection for its high school students. A company known as "The Sentinels" is hired to guarantee security at the school. However, the men in this company are more Nazi than Himmler, and they are soon bullying and abusing the students they were supposed to protect. After the editor of the school paper gets involved in resolving this bad situation, he enlists the help of the former girlfriend of Sentinels leader. The two eventually begin to figure out what needs to be done. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

This future dystopia tale is set in what remains of the U.S.A. 900 years after a nuclear war. People have banded into clans, where women fight and win control over a region while men are held as slaves and divided into functional groups, such as laborers, servants, or those who father children. When the leader of the dominant female clan dies, there is a dispute over her vacated position; two sisters vie for the honor and are challenged by the leader of a another clan. Meanwhile, one of the men has found an old presidential bunker and a stash of weapons. His plan is to use his discovery to free the men at last. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Over ten years after making the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper returns to his deranged family of reclusive cannibals for another round of chainsaw chases and non-stop screaming. Hooper brings a real budget this time (having recently directed Poltergeist for Steven Spielberg) and the talents of veteran make-up artist Tom Savini. This means he can make things bigger, louder, and gorier than ever before -- and they are. He also brings a wacky, self-deprecating sense of humor, as if deliberately flaunting Texas Chainsaw Massacre's status as one of the first and still greatest "splatter" movies. The result is an impish take-off on the original film (and contemporary horror movies in general) that elevates its own clichés -- buckets of blood and gore, droll dialogue, the screaming female lead -- to the level of high camp. The movie is loosely concerned with a small-town disc jockey named "Stretch" (Caroline Williams, who does most of the screaming) and an embittered Texas Ranger named "Lefty" (Dennis Hopper). They team up and decide to put an end to the murderous activities of the Sawyer family once and for all (that is, of course, until Texas Chainsaw Massacre III). The real highlight of the film is when Stretch and Lefty find their way into the Sawyer family hideout -- a ruinous, winding abattoir underneath an abandoned amusement park -- and engage in a chainsaw-battle-to-the-death with Leatherface (Bill Johnson) and the rest of the clan. Jim Siedow is back from the first film as the acerbic Drayton Sawyer, the family cook and owner of the Last Roundup Rolling Grill. Chop-Top (Bill Moseley) and Leatherface do most of the movie's dirty work. ~ Anthony Reed, All Movie Guide

After receiving a mysterious gold piece, Quatermain travels to Africa to find his brother, who is searching for a lost white tribe. In his search, Quatermain discovers a lost civilization. This film is a follow-up to King Solomon's Mines. ~ All Movie Guide

This comedy about the "sanity" of those in an asylum focuses on popular Israeli comic Seffi Rivlin, who plays a bank manager who discovers that the inmates of a mental institution are running a counterfeiting operation from the basement of their hospital. Actors exaggerate their portrayals of the patients, and the plot zooms off in several directions at once. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

This is a very macho action film in which the good guys are just that "guys". Col. Cooper (David Carridine) has been captured by the North Vietnamese and wheels and deals his way out of this predicament with the sleazy Vietnamese commandant, Capt. Vinh (Mako). Vinh agrees to let Cooper and the other P.O.W.s leave if Cooper will take Vinh and his ill-gotten gains back with them to the United States. Cooper agrees, and then has to struggle with the ever-frustrating Sparks (Charles R. Floyd), who thinks he knows better than anyone else about how to escape from the camp. The motley crew set off into the jungle, encountering the enemy and a very uncooperative Mother Nature along the way. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Two young adventurers sign on to a cruise ship as performing knife throwers and get involved in all kinds of hijinks that begin when the bodies of two officers are found stabbed to death in this sea-going musical British farce. Meanwhile, the smooth-talking dopes attempt to convince the members of an all-girl band that they are powerful record executives. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Director Itzhak Yeshurun uses dissention in a high school as an allegory for the difficulties in mid-'80s Israeli society in this routine drama. One of the students in the school makes others miserable with his abrasive, brooding temperament after his girlfriend dumps him. Things start to go wrong when he and the other students work on a project to build an airplane, and the Arabs in the school are maliciously blamed for the trouble. The ex-girlfriend's punk brother shows up, and the entire situation deteriorates into violence. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Having previously staged Verdi's 1887 opera Otello at the Met and La Scala, filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli committed his production to film in 1986. Starring as the fatally jealous Moor of Venice is Placido Domingo, who had also headlined Zeffirelli's 1976 La Scala staging (production on the film was briefly interrupted while Domingo participated in the rescue operations following the Mexico City earthquake). While Katia Ricciarelli as Desdemona and Justino Diaz as Iago perform their own singing, Zeffirelli's Cassio--played by real-life European prince Urbano Barberini--is dubbed by Ezio de Cesare. The director made several cuts in the original libretto and score in order to accommodate the film's two-hour time limit, but these excisions are done with taste and discretion. Because of the excessive violence in the third act--two murders, a suicide, a superficial throat-slashing--Otello was released with a PG rating. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this action film set during the Korean War, a crude and brutal sergeant (Everett McGill ) has a sense of morality fixed at an altitude of about three feet above the gutter on his best days. Yet as time goes on, he is miraculously transformed into the shining opposite as though his defects were no more serious than a hangnail. His unit seems to suffer from the same moral blindness, except they are not brutal. The Dutch soldiers underneath him are sexually occupied with a Korean refugee woman and her daughter when a Chinese contingent launches a surprise attack. At this point, some viewers will be cheering for the Chinese. There is not much action in spite of this moment of combat, most of the movie centers on dialogue. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Director Tobe Hooper adapts Colin Wilson's edgy novel The Space Vampires in this in this horror/sci-fi epic with a cult following. The story concerns a joint British-American space probe of Hailey's Comet. Inside the comet, the astronauts, headed by Carlsen (Steve Railsback), find a spaceship that contains the dead bodies of several aliens, along with the naked bodies of three human-like creatures in suspended animation. They bring the aliens aboard the ship for examination, but the specimens are sloppily guarded and soon the trio spread contagion among the population of the ship. Returning to earth, the beautiful space vampire (Mathilda May) escapes into London and begins to feed of the bodies of the unwary Britons, turning the city into a zombie-populated wasteland. It is now left for Carlsen to stop the vampire invaders. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

An softcore film featuring sado-masochism and bondage, Hot Chili concerns four teen-age boys who go to work at an exclusive Mexican spa. In spite of the orders of the manager, they are soon sexually involved with innumerable buxom and in sometimes kinky guests, ranging from a Nazi to a swinging elderly couple from Texas. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide